This post isn’t a recipe, but an attempt to get my thoughts down on a topic that’s really dear to my heart – pushing ourselves to do HARD THINGS.
First of all, let’s face it, life is tough. We get curve balls thrown at us every day and have to deal with some pretty serious stuff. If we are mentally weak, and haven’t had to push ourselves or overcome very many things regularly, we aren’t going to feel very prepared when things don’t go exactly as planned in life. (when do they ever?). So im going to use a sports analogy for this one, and hopefully I don’t lose you.
In high school I competed in track and field. I had a lot of good friends on my team and awesome coaches that I enjoyed being with, practice was pretty much always laid back and was rarely stressful. I thought I was grateful for this situation I had, until the weekends came and I’d show up for a track meet with a lot of pressure to do well and push my body to its limits. This was incredibly scary for me, I wasn’t used to the pain in my legs that I would feel during long races or the nerves I would get that would make me want to throw up my breakfast or worse yet, not eat at all. I was so afraid because i hadnt put myself in challenging situations at practice, so I could hardly handle the pressure of a real meet. Track became this scary thing for me and I felt sick before almost every meet! A lot of times I would try to get out of the longer races because I was so afraid I wouldn’t be able to handle them physically or mentally.
Luckily I decided to stick it out and ran track at the collegiate level after high school. I felt nervous from time to time at track meets, but mostly, on race day I felt a strong sense of confidence and excitement. What changed for me? Well, I showed up every day at practice and pushed myself mentally and physically as hard as I knew how to. I accomplished things at PRACTICE that I never knew I could. When the meet came on the weekend, I knew HOW HARD I worked my ass off during the week, on race day it was time to just let my body do what it knew how to do and enjoy the ride. It was my chance to PERFORM. This was such a different experience for me from high school and instead of worrying I would fail, I was excited to succeed!
Now, post college athletics I still continue to push myself to my limits. When life gets hard or scary, I have such a reserve i can draw from where I was able to pull through my pain, fear, exhaustion and come out not only okay, but able to achieve and overcome obstacles I never thought possible. So, this doesn’t just apply to working out people, it applies to all hard things. We have to put ourselves in tough places at times to make sure we stay strong. For some of us, staying strong might just mean making it through the day, for others maybe it’s running a marathon, not eating that piece of cake we shouldnt have, speaking up when you know you should, pulling an all-nighter at work our school or dealing with the loss of someone we love.
We can do hard things people, and the more we test our limits regularly, the more confident we will be when we aren’t in control of what life throws at us. We can do things we never thought possible, but unless we try, we’ll never know what we can accomplish.
So I challenge each of you, do something hard or scary this week, tell yourself you CAN. Who knows, maybe you’ll learn a thing or two about yourself. And maybe, you’ll be surprised at how strong you really are.
I believe in you.
Michaela
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